by Tate James
Biting my lip to keep from laughing, I was tempted to just quietly back away. Zed, being a total prick, started clapping.
"Bravo!" he shouted, and Misha slipped out of Maxine—showing us why he'd made such good money working in porn—and dove for his pants. "Encore."
Maxine was way less embarrassed as she propped up on her elbow and turned to smirk at us. "Nothing you haven't seen before, Zayden."
I flipped off my friend, and she just waggled her naked rear at me with a laugh.
"Let's reschedule," I told Misha, grabbing Zed's arm and dragging him out of the office before Maxine could fucking proposition a four-way. She was the worst, but come to think of it, her and Misha were perfect for one another.
Zed and I grinned the whole way back to the car, then headed back to the hotel to break the news of our temporary house guest to the other guys. Emphasis on temporary.
64
Chase was denied bail, shocker. But as badly as I wanted to leave him to rot in holding with anticipation hanging over his head, I still had my doubts on the security. No, I wouldn’t feel safe until he was securely locked up in the prison I’d personally selected for him. So I pushed the timeline up with plenty of monetary lubricant, and his case went to trial in just three weeks.
Diana had been delivered to Shadow Prep boarding school a little over a week before, but considering how close the school was to our rented house, I wasn’t shocked when she showed up on our doorstep at the end of the school week. She announced that since Zoya was allowed to spend weekends working in the cafe with Nadia, she should be allowed to spend them with us. Besides that, she had decided the other kids in the boarding school were all rich brats and if she was forced to spend the weekend there without Zoya, she’d stab someone.
I blamed Zed for that. He’d given the little feral a dagger as a starting-school gift, and she was probably sleeping with it.
So when Monday morning rolled around, I found myself doing the familiar Shadow Prep drop-off for Diana before heading to the Cloudcroft court where Chase’s trial was being conducted.
Seph was waiting on the steps of the courthouse for me and gave a disbelieving laugh as I made my way up to her.
“Dare,” she exclaimed, “you look... are you feeling okay? Did you hit your head in the shower?” She reached out to feel my forehead, and I gave her a smirk, adjusting the string of pearls around my neck.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Persephone,” I replied in my most innocent voice. “Corsets and leather didn’t seem like appropriate trial attire.”
She snickered, and her escort for the day, Lincoln, looked like his brain was short-circuiting as he took in my demure knee-length skirt, cream silk blouse, sheer pantyhose, and, of course, my pearls. I fully intended to clutch at them in horror as Chase’s crimes were presented to the jury.
“You look like a sexy librarian,” Lucas murmured in my ear, his hand touching the small of my back. “I’m gonna be hard every time I look at you today.”
Cass grunted in amusement. “You’re hard any time she breathes, Gumdrop. Besides, she’d need a pair of glasses to complete the sexy-librarian look.”
I made a mental note to get some glasses for tomorrow.
Seph grabbed my hand as we entered the courthouse, and I shot her a grateful smile. For all my acting and bullshitting, this was still a huge deal. Yes, I was putting Chase through an actual legal trial to punish him further. Yes, I could have just had him killed at any point that he was in holding in the last three weeks. But a huge part of me needed this level of vindication. I needed his crimes to be aired out and for a court to condemn him for what he’d done. And not just what he’d done to the hundreds of people—children—he’d trafficked over the years, but to me. To make up for the years of abuse and the stains left on my soul.
This trial was about more than appearances. And Seph knew that. She knew deep down I wasn’t a ruthless, coldhearted crime boss, lording my victory over my opponent to make him squirm. I was a victim seeking justice.
Of course, my guys understood that too, but it meant so damn much to have my sister there supporting me, especially after all the years she’d lived in ignorance, throwing my dark past at me as a weapon.
The first few days of the trial were harder than I’d expected them to be. I had to sit there and listen to all the evidence I had compiled against Chase. Stolen video footage, photos, recordings, testimonials. The hardest was when it came to my recent detainment. Chase had fucked up when he’d sent that video to Zed, trying to get a rise out of him. He’d sent it without any hacker available to delete it again, and even in my panic attack I had thought ahead. It was cut-and-dry evidence, and I wasn’t so delicate not to use it.
After almost a full week of the prosecution’s evidence, the defense for Chase only took a scarce half hour. His attorney was a nervous, sweating man who stumbled over his words and all but told the jury he believed his client to be guilty. I smiled throughout the whole defense, quietly laughing to myself at the painfully substandard representation Chase had been able to acquire.
He was found guilty on all counts, to no one's surprise. The jury had barely even left the room before returning with a unanimous verdict.
Throughout it all, Chase never spoke a word. Not in his own defense or to hurl insults at me. He just sat there and stared, his single beady eye assessing me like he was trying to work out how in the hell I’d set him up so thoroughly. Trying and failing because despite several of the crimes I’d provided evidence on, I wasn’t incriminated in any of them. Not once.
“Alright,” Demi said, coming over to me as Chase was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. “Case is over. Spill.”
I raised my brows. “On what?”
Her glare flattened. “You know what. How Chase fucking Lockhart ended up with what had to be the absolute worst defense attorney in the country? Or how you managed to even get your hands on half that evidence? Or, shit, how you aren’t currently being charged alongside him?”
Cass and I exchanged a knowing look, both smiling. “Let’s just say it took a whole lot of money, planning, research, blackmail, and... the occasional fatal accident. Eventually, though, we made sure not a single defense lawyer worth their salt would come within sixty miles of this case. Not if they valued their careers or lives.” I kept my voice down, not wanting to be overheard by anyone as we made our way out of the courthouse and into the sunshine. Damn, it was a beautiful day. “As for how I’m walking away from it all? I didn’t get to this position by leaving my ass uncovered, Demi. You know that. Chase put all his eggs in the wrong basket, thinking they were safe. I just drove a bulldozer over it.”
She snorted a laugh. “And then some. What if he escapes?”
“He won’t.” I gave her a confident smile.
My aunt looked less convinced, raising her brows. “He’s got seemingly bottomless pits of money; he could—“
“Not anymore, he doesn’t.” It was one of the first things I’d pulled the trigger on, before he was even arrested. I couldn’t run the risk of him being granted bail, no matter how expensive. So I’d taken every damn cent in his name. The entire Lockhart fortune was now being bounced through accounts all around the world, cleaning any trace of its origin, and eventually it’d come back to me.
“Okay, but he still has connections,” Demi pushed. “How can you be so sure he won’t leverage one of them to escape and start this whole fucking game anew?”
I grinned wider. “He won’t. His only allies of any concern are all dead.” Either I’d killed them myself, like the six names on my list, or Cass had slipped into their homes like the ghost he’d been and provided them with an untimely end of “natural causes” during his stealth mission for me.
“I’m just saying he’s resourceful.” Demi frowned. She, like Hannah, couldn’t understand why I hadn’t killed him once and for all. They didn’t understand, though. They didn’t understand how death was a mercy Chase Lockhart didn’t deserve
. Not until he’d experienced just a fraction of what he’d put me through. What he would have put me through, if the scales of fate had tipped in his favor at any point.
I patted my aunt on the arm, reassuring her. “So am I, Demi. Trust me. Chase Lockhart is no longer a threat.”
As I said this, the armored prison van carrying my nemesis pulled out of the loading dock behind the courthouse and turned into the street flanked by police cars. It slowed somewhat as it drew close to where I stood on the steps with my aunt, my guys just a couple of steps behind us.
I smiled a smug, satisfied smile and offered a small wave to the female driver with a long, silver-white ponytail looped through a uniform cap. She smirked, her blood-red lips curling up as she gave a finger wave back. Then she tipped the brim of her hat lower before accelerating the truck down the street, carrying Chase out of my cities… and my life.
Demi must have spotted her too, and gasped. “Was that who I think it was?”
I gave a low chuckle. “Yup. Told you he wasn’t escaping.”
Her eyes widened, and she nodded in understanding. “I thought you hated the Guild.”
I shrugged and decided not to answer her question. “Come on, let’s head home so I can take these ridiculous pearls off. We’ve got Seph’s going-away party to plan too.”
“Did I hear my name?” my sister asked, bouncing over to us with a huge smile on her face. “Congratulations, big sister,” she told me, wrapping her arms around me in a tight hug.
“Thanks, brat,” I murmured back, returning her hug.
She left with two of Rex’s boys, and Demi gave me a kiss on the cheek before heading down the steps to her Uber. Then it was just me and my guys, standing in front of the Cloudcroft courthouse.
“So, how does it feel?” Lucas asked, his warm palm touching the small of my back. “It’s all over.”
I smiled, turning to face him, then my gaze shifted to Cass and Zed. “Is it?” I murmured. “It feels more like a new beginning.”
Zed reached out, linking his fingers with mine, and rubbed his thumb over my ring, his love shining bright in his eyes. “Beginning of a new era. I like it.”
Cass just grunted and loosened his tie. “I fucking love you, Red,” he muttered. Then his eyes narrowed at Zed and Lucas. “You two aren’t half bad, either.”
Zed snickered, but Lucas grinned and launched himself at Cass in a bear hug. “Grumpy Cat looooves us!”
Cass and Lucas joked and teased each other all the way back to the car, but Zed hung back and looped his arm around my waist as we walked. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. My turbulent soul was finally calm. Finally at peace.
For the first time in my whole life, I was completely happy.
Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER
I’d said it before, and I’d say it again and again until the day I died. The absolute best way—scratch that, the only acceptable way—to be woken up at dawn was with a massive, hot, hard dick pushing into your sleepy cunt. Followed by multiple orgasms at the hands of your three legally wed husbands on the morning after your marriage in a temple in Tibet, of course.
Un-fucking-beatable.
When I’d told Cass that I would only get married if it were legal to marry all three of them, I hadn’t known I was challenging him. He’d done his research, then one morning when Zed was tracing my spine tattoo and telling Lucas about our hike to Base Camp, it’d given him ideas.
It took the better part of a year for them to convince me, but here we were. I was helpless to refuse them anything when they put their minds to it. And with polyandry legal in Tibet, I had no real reasons to refuse. Fuck knew I loved them enough.
They woke me up at dawn, and we fucked like the newlyweds we were as the sun rose over snowy mountains. By the time we got around to cleaning up and putting on clothes to leave our room, it was lunchtime.
“Well, hey there, Mrs. Timber,” Seph teased as we made our way into the main dining room of the luxury lodge we’d exclusively rented for the wedding party. “You look like you had an exhausting wedding night. You’ve got something here.” She indicated to my neck where I knew full fucking well Cass had left a bite mark this morning. Fucking savage.
“Shut up, brat,” I muttered, then yawned heavily as I sat down at the table. Seph was sitting with Rex, Demi, and Stacey, and Diana was over at the buffet table filling her plate with as many sweets as she could get her paws on. Plenty of our other friends had made the trip to Tibet for the occasion, but only the five of us were hanging out having lunch. Nadia had left us a note to say she was visiting a local family who would teach her how to milk a yak… or something.
Lucas draped his arm over the back of my chair and placed a soft kiss on my cheek before whispering one of the sexiest things on earth in my ear.
“I’ll get you coffee, babe.”
I turned to kiss his lips and murmured my thanks before he got up to deliver on his promise, leaving his seat vacant for Zed to steal.
“You guys are so loved up it makes me want to vomit,” Seph told us with a smile. “Are you gonna talk to Little A today?”
I rolled my eyes. “Not you too.”
Seph grinned harder. “What? I think it’s cute. She totally suits Artemis, and it fits our theme.”
“So does Diana,” I muttered. But sometimes I could swear the feisty nine-year-old was even more stubborn than me. And that was saying something. She’d recently decided she wanted to be called Artemis because Diana is a Roman name, but Hades and Persephone are Greek. She’d gotten it into her head that she only fit in with our family if she swapped to the Greek goddess’s name instead.
“We did say after the wedding,” Zed reminded me.
I knew that; it was why I had brought the envelope down to breakfast with me. “Just wait until everyone is here,” I said quietly as Diana headed back over to the table with a whole stacked-high pyramid of sweets on her plate.
“Hey guys!” she greeted us enthusiastically. “The food here is so good; are you sure we have to leave tomorrow?”
“Yes,” I replied with a soft glare. “You have to get back to school, and Seph needs to get back to her classes.”
“And her boyfriend,” Demi teased, poking Seph in the side and making my sister squirm.
Seph’s cheeks pinked. “Shut up,” she grumbled. It was a new thing for her, and she was all kinds of awkward when pressed for information about Matthieu. He was French-Canadian, a year older than her, and had turned out to be squeaky clean to the point of boring when I’d checked his background. Not that I’d ever admit it to Seph, but he was exactly the nice kind of guy I felt safe with her dating.
Also, I’d taken a quick day-trip to Michigan after their first date and had a chat with him myself. He wouldn’t hurt her if he valued his balls.
Lucas returned with my coffee and a plate of food, and Cass slouched into the chair beside Diana, his own plate even more loaded than hers.
“’Sup, Big Man?” she greeted him with a nod.
He grunted a response around a huge bite of food.
Demi cleared her throat, then smiled at her wife. “Stacey, sweetheart, could you show Rex that gorgeous garden we discovered yesterday?”
Rex screwed his face up. “What the fuck do I wanna see a garden for?”
Demi rolled her eyes, and Stacey laughed as she nudged Rex out of his chair and herded him from the room, lecturing him on reading between the lines.
Diana gave me a suspicious look, her cheeks full of pastry. When I simply stared back at her, she chewed quickly and swallowed before putting her hands up defensively.
“If this is about that fight at school last week, I didn’t start it.”
I cocked a brow since that was the first I’d heard of any fights at school recently.
Cass rumbled with amusement. “Nah, but you finished it.” He stuck his fist out, and Diana bumped knuckled with him. What the fuck?
I narrowed my eyes at Cass, and he shrugged
.
“I took care of it with the school,” he assured me, like that was the point. “They need a new wing added to the library anyway.”
And he had the gall to question why we’d be shitty parents. The three of them had been subtly pushing that issue in the lead-up to our wedding, but eventually, after I’d explained my thoughts on the matter, they’d come around.
Simply put, I didn’t want to mess up a kid with our lifestyle. We were killers, plain and simple. We ran illegal businesses, smuggled drugs and guns, and operated brothels inside our strip clubs. More than that, we would always have danger looming. The price of power was that someone would forever be trying to take what you had. Usually by force. One day, they might get lucky and actually kill one of us.
Unless we wanted to give that all up and move to the suburbs, then we couldn’t have kids of our own. I refused to raise a child in that world, and I was so deeply entrenched in it there was no possible way I could remove myself and start afresh. I’d end up shooting some bitch at a PTA meeting or something.
“This wasn’t about that,” I answered Diana. “But now I’m thinking it should be. Was anyone hurt?”
Diana scoffed. “Of course. Pretty sure I broke Carolyn’s nose. The blood spray was epic.”
Zed snickered, then covered it with a cough and hid behind his cup of coffee. Asshole.
I took a moment to sip my own coffee, then prayed for sanity in what I was about to do. But the guys and I had discussed it at length, as had Demi, Seph, and I. This seemed like the best solution.
Drawing a deep breath, I pulled the folded envelope from my pocket. “Diana—“
“Artemis,” she quickly corrected. I glared, and she shot back an impish grin. “Continue.”
I shifted my gaze to Lucas, silently asking if we were doing the right thing. His smile was pure encouragement, though, and Zed squeezed my knee under the table. Cass slouched back in his chair, extending his leg to press against mine, just like Zed used to do when I needed support.